The collaboration between the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) and Ars Electronica has resulted in the prestigious CIFO x Ars Electronica Awards, established in 2022. These highly regarded awards celebrate and support emerging and mid-career Latin American artists exploring technology in new media and digital art. Three recipients are granted up to $30,000, empowering them to bring their groundbreaking projects to life.
In 2023, the second edition of the awards presents the exhibition “Dualities in Equalities: Art, Technology, Society in Latin America”, in the frame of the Ars Electronica Festival, featuring a total of nine artistic perspectives from the region and cultural context of Latin America. The exhibition invites the six winners of the CIFO Awards to showcase their works alongside the three recipients of the CIFO x Ars Electronica Awards. The result is a compelling blend of artistic expressions, united by shared themes while distinct in their individual expression and use of tools.
CIFO x Ars Electronica: Latin American Narratives and Creative Approaches
A fresh perspective on media art and on tackling global challenges will once again be brought to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz in 2023 by artists from Latin America.
The exhibition delves into the circumstances under which artists create their art and investigates the profound impact of global transformation and innovative digital technologies on their work. These themes hold widespread relevance and are actively embraced and explored by traditional art disciplines.
Representing a vibrant, critical and diverse art scene, the exhibition emerges from a shared cultural foundation. It offers a unique opportunity to explore the concept of Latin American culture through various artistic lenses, rejecting a singular viewpoint in favor of a richer and more nuanced understanding.
Nine different artistic positions have been selected, showcasing the works of individuals from various generations, dialects, life situations and artistic genres. Together, they provide a fascinating and comprehensive insight into the mission of the collaboration between CIFO and Ars Electronica.
“Dualities in Equalities: Art, Technology, Society in Latin America” invites you to delve into the complex interplay of artistic perspectives, where diverse voices converge to illuminate the rich tapestry of the Latin American art scene.
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0.0.
Andrés Ramírez Gaviria (CO)
0.0. is an artwork that invites contemplation on the concepts of time, space and complexity. With a deliberate focus on the minimalist notion of the zero point, which has been associated with simplicity, reduction and the elimination of excess, the artwork depicts the destruction of two glass cubes.
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Añoranzas (Yira Yira)
Joaquín Aras (AR)
An homage to Argentine cinema pioneer Federico Valle, who after losing his studio was forced to sell his films to a comb factory to use their celluloid as raw material. By recycling plastic combs to turn them into projectable film, the experimental film installation presents a poetic approach trying to revert Valle’s cultural loss.
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El cuarto del artista en Bahareque
Rosemberg Sandoval (CO)
The artist’s room in Bahareque is a metaphorical recreation of the artist’s private space, which represents his own creative universe, but most importantly, it is a processual homage to Colombia’s intricate economical and racial fabric and its diverse underlying socio-historical problems.
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Inoculate
Ana María Gómez López (CO/US)
How can a plant seed begin to grow within a human eye? Inoculate is a self-experiment that involves the sprouting of a seedling within a lacrimal duct. This vital process comprises the creation of an intracorporeal botanical implant—one that transforms the human body into a material substrate for the development of a vegetal organism sustained…
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Reflections
Jhafis Quintero Gonzalez (PA)
The traditional concept of prison and the uniformity of privatized punishment is a reality that everyone feels falsely from afar, ignoring the culture of control outside of them. Maybe the high contrast of traditional prisons, sublimated in this piece through the penitentiary mirrors with the phrase “We all live in the paradox of the castaway…
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Tales from the Mountaintop
Adrian Melis (CU/ES)
The project seeks to expose a politicized society that lives in the present in the shadow of its ideological legacy. The sonic realism of the sequences generates a contrast of values between what we see and hear. Ethical and aesthetic values where the echoes of political triumph resonate, collapse and in turn connect with the…
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The Ark
Natalia Espinosa (EC)
If an ark were available at the peak of our environmental disaster…who would be able to board?
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Vibrant Self
Alba Triana (CO)
Vibrant Self examines the link between nature’s fundamental structure and the individuals’ environment, sociocultural context and personal construct, manifested as mood, action, meaning, agenda and ideology. Interacting visitors listen to a sound archive inducing reactions captured by a BCI. This data is transformed into soundwaves that visually unveil their brainwaves and muscular responses using a…
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Wild Machines
Jonathan Torres Rodríguez (CR)
This project makes use of the power that speculative thought provides to imagine a present world that revalues to matter, a place of technologies whose preprogrammed expiration is in relation to the needs of the environments and not those of the economic system. Technologies that use energetic and material resources with balance.